28．The Global Witch Hunt Against Spiritual Awakening

I returned to Abadiânia looking for rest and found a town in ruins.

Only months earlier, I had come here seeking healing and witnessed things I still could not explain. Now the Casa was closed, the pilgrims were gone, and João de Deus—the healer at the centre of it all—had fallen under accusations that would destroy his name.

What unsettled me was larger than the fate of one man. If something sacred had truly happened here, what became of that truth when the person through whom it seemed to pass proved deeply human? And as similar stories began reaching me from elsewhere, another question followed: what exactly was I witnessing—the exposure of false prophets, the corruption of spiritual power, or a wider campaign shaped by political forces that remained largely hidden from view?

By mid-December, I was back in Abadiânia.

The town seemed to have withdrawn into itself. A chill stillness hung over the streets. Shops stood half-empty. The Casa was shut. The crowds I remembered from May — pilgrims in white, buses pulling in, cafés bright with foreign voices, the almost festive atmosphere of faith — had vanished.

As I passed Café Central, I saw the owner dragging chairs across the pavement. She was as brisk and vivid as ever. When she recognised me, she waved from the doorway and called out, “Read the Book of Revelation, sweetheart. It’s coming!”

She laughed as she said it, yet the words landed strangely. I smiled, nodded, and kept walking, though something inside me tightened. The town’s quiet did not feel ordinary. It felt watchful, as if people had already understood something they had not yet found a way to say.

I went first to see Tracy, my former Casa guide. We met at her favourite restaurant, and I ordered the açaí she loved. Her living situation had recently become precarious, and the collapse around the Casa had left her unsettled. The strain showed in her face, though she still laughed and told me she had no intention of going back to the U.S.

There was a hard-won calm in her that moved me. It brought back something Ruth had once said about Abadiânia: too many people came here hoping to remain inside blessing, healing, and sacred atmosphere. Over time, refuge could turn into avoidance. Even in a place thick with prayer, no one was excused from the unfinished work of her own life.

After a few minutes of ordinary talk, I asked about John of God’s arrest. His name seemed to cast a shadow over every street in town.

Tracy looked down and drew her spoon through the dark purple açaí.

“It isn’t strange,” she said. “Around the year 2000, the entities warned the town through John. They said that one day very few people would come here — only as many as strands of hair.”

I sat with the phrase. Strands of hair. At the time, it sounded less like a prediction than a sentence delivered long before anyone understood the charge. I wondered whether the spirits had seen the collapse before the town could imagine it: the day John would be taken away, and the place built around him would lose the force that had held it together.

Tracy leaned closer.

“And now Brazil has a new president coming in,” she said. “The last one knew John. He liked him, or at least he was open to spiritual healing. This new one is different.”

She paused, as if deciding how much to tell me.

Tracy then repeated a story she said she had heard locally, “I heard John received a phone call before the arrest,” she said. “Someone told him, ‘If you want to stay out of the investigation, give me your money. Otherwise, wait and see what happens.’”

“Who called him?” I asked.

Tracy looked at me with an expression I could not read.

“No one knows. Only that he ignored it. Soon after, everything happened.”

I said, perhaps too quickly, “Any reasonable person would ignore a call like that. No one hands over a lifetime of money because a stranger threatens them.”

She did not answer. Her spoon touched the side of the bowl with a small, sharp sound. After a while, she said, “Brazil is corrupt. Everything depends on money and connections. John’s political protection was gone. No one was covering him anymore.”

I had no independent evidence that John had ever been politically protected, or that his arrest was connected to any change of government. Still, given his prominence in Brazil and the many influential people who had passed through the Casa over the years, I did not find it surprising that he might have had political contacts or acquaintances. That was very different, however, from concluding that those connections had protected him from scrutiny.

I pressed her on the accusations. Did she think they were true, exaggerated, or part of something else?

She looked up then, her eyes tired and difficult to read. Slowly, she told me about a famous Indian spiritual teacher whose influence had spread across the world. According to the story she had heard, he Indian government had grown uneasy with him because his followers were learning to think freely. Officials, she said, had tried to persuade several women close to him to accuse him of sexual misconduct; when they refused, other charges allegedly followed, including burning a flag and disturbing public order.

I listened, understanding what she was suggesting: that when power has already decided a person must fall, it may find the vocabulary afterward.

Her story brought back conversations I had heard in 2014, when members of an experiencer support group exchanged such cases in private. In those circles, people spoke of character assassination as a cleaner instrument than death. Sexual misconduct, they said, was one of the quickest ways to destroy a male whistleblower. Once a moral stain attached itself to a name, public opinion could do the rest. Contempt could outlast a bullet.

The older methods now seemed almost clumsy by comparison. Sudden illnesses, accidents, convenient deaths: figures such as Dr. Karla Turner and Philip Schneider had become, in the minds of those who followed them, more powerful after death than they had been in life. The circumstances of their endings gave their warnings a terrible afterglow. To believers, the deaths themselves became evidence.

Someone in the support group once reduced the pattern to a single brutal sentence. I heard it then without fully taking it in. Years later, it returned to me with a colder edge: “Men are destroyed through accusations of sexual misconduct; women through accusations of exploiting others for money.” I heard it then without fully taking it in. Years later, it returned with a colder edge.

After a moment, Tracy added, “Of course, there had always been rumours about John being a womaniser. He had been married a few times. He had children. His current wife was young. Perhaps he did have a weakness in that area. Perhaps he failed to control his sexual impulses and did things he should never have done.”

Yet sitting across from Tracy, I was also facing another question: when a man once revered as a medium of divine power falls, how does one distinguish actual wrongdoing from exaggeration, political witch-hunt, and the deliberate destruction of a public image? I also wondered whether truth itself could become caught inside a larger machinery of narrative, power, and ruin.

One thing was already clear to me. In UFO and spiritual communities, the destruction of whistleblowers and spiritual figures was a familiar story. I thought of Stan Romanek, once one of the better-known American alien experiencers. His case was often discussed in those circles as an example of character assassination. Romanek was convicted of felony possession of child sexual abuse material; according to him, however, the illegal material found on his computer had been planted and later used by figures connected to the intelligence world to force him into silence. He said he was pressured to stop speaking about extraterrestrial contact and to discredit himself publicly in interviews, so that no one would believe him again. In exchange, the charges would be dropped. I had no way to verify his account. What stayed with me was the logic such stories revealed inside those communities: destroy a person’s reputation, and there is no need to kill the body.

Once a public image collapses, everything attached to it begins to collapse as well. What might once have been heard with curiosity is reduced to fraud. Whatever truth may have been present can disappear beneath ridicule, disgust, and the relief people feel when they no longer have to listen.

I folded my arms, leaned towards her, and asked, “Then what happens to the town? So many people made their living because of him. If John ends up in prison, how is this place supposed to go on?”

Tracy seemed tired of my concern for John’s case. A trace of impatience entered her voice.

“This town can survive without John of God,” she said, a little sharply. “You know this place sits on a whole bed of crystal. The land itself has energy. The entities have always been here. The healing force never depended on John alone. Even without him as the medium, the Casa can still open. People can still come, sit in the current room, meditate, receive healing, even witness miracles. The world doesn’t stop turning because John is gone.”

Then she paused, as if she wanted the next sentence to stay with me.

“Don’t forget,” she said. “That power never belonged to one man.”

Her words quieted something in me. The sacred had never belonged to one person. If true healing came from a higher source, it would not disappear because one medium had fallen.

After saying goodbye to Tracy with a hug, I went to visit the owner of the pousada where I had stayed in May. She welcomed me with the same warm, unguarded Latin hospitality, as if I were an old friend returning after a long absence. Within minutes she had made tea and invited me to sit with her.

When we spoke about John of God, her view was close to Tracy’s, though there was more resignation in her voice. The more attention his case attracted overseas, she said, the emptier the town became. Her pousada had always depended heavily on foreign visitors. Now, she said, most of the rooms stood vacant and business had fallen sharply.

She walked me through the pousada. The courtyard was unnaturally still. Wind moved through the bamboo with a dry, brittle sound. Most of the guest rooms were closed, their windows dark, no lights on inside. I tried to comfort her.

“Maybe it’s only because of Christmas and New Year,” I said, forcing a brightness I did not quite feel. “People are home with their families. Business may come back after the holidays.”

She nodded, but said nothing. Then she pointed toward another pousada around the corner, a place that had once been almost impossible to book.

“Go and look,” she said quietly. “The gate is locked now. No one comes anymore.”

After I left her, I followed the road she had shown me. The gate was indeed locked, a heavy padlock hanging from it. Through the gap I saw no movement, no light. As I walked on, I began to notice the same scene everywhere: closed doors, shuttered windows, empty courtyards. The whole town seemed suspended in a kind of half-sleep.

A sadness rose in me that I could not quite name. This place, where so many miracles had once appeared, seemed to have completed one stage of its earthly mission. It had shown the world a glimpse of what might be possible when spirituality, miracle, and medicine meet at the wounds of the body and the soul. Now it seemed to be retreating into silence.

And yet, during those quiet days, I still received deep healing there. My heart was soothed by a gentle light, and I felt, with unmistakable clarity, that the divine presence had not left.

***

After the holiday, when I was back in Australia, the words the owner of Café Central had shouted across that cold, empty street kept returning to me.

“Read the Book of Revelation, sweetheart. It’s coming!”

At the time, I did not know what to make of it. Abadiânia was full of such moments — half joke, half omen, spoken lightly and then left to trouble the air. Still, the sentence stayed with me. Years later, it felt less like a passing remark than an early tremor, the first vibration of something I could sense long before I understood it.

What happened in Brazil in 2018 would not remain, in my mind, a local scandal around one spiritual healer. It became the first visible fracture in what I began to see as a wider pattern. A pressure was beginning to show itself across borders and traditions, reaching into places where faith, healing, authority, and human consciousness meet.

Before that second trip to Brazil, Cheng had told me about another healing town she had visited: Palmelo. She described it with warmth, as a small, hidden place where the air felt washed clean, the energy was gentle, and healings still occurred with quiet regularity. Through her, I was introduced to several Taiwanese friends who had spent years moving between Abadiânia and Palmelo. They spoke of spiritual healing with real devotion. Their hope was to build a healing centre of their own in Brazil, a place dedicated to service, compassion, and the care of those who came seeking help.

Later, when I asked one of them how things were going in Palmelo, the line went silent.

“Our situation…” she said at last. Her voice had dropped, as if she were holding something back. “It’s very bad.”

What she told me next settled in my chest like a weight.

Palmelo had a new mayor. For decades, this small, quiet town had lived from spiritual healing and the modest guesthouses that had grown around it. Previous mayors, my friend said, had at least made room for the tradition because healing was woven into the town’s livelihood, its inheritance, the bond between the land and the people who came there seeking help.

This new mayor, she said, was different. According to Cheng, his administration had little sympathy for the healing centres and began placing one administrative obstacle after another in their way. I had no independent basis to assess the municipality’s reasons for those measures. Places that had never had to think seriously about survival were suddenly struggling to keep their doors open.

“Palmelo has never been through anything like this,” she said.

For a few seconds, neither of us spoke. Across the distance, I could hear only the faint sound of our breathing. In that silence, I saw the town as I imagined it: blue sky over empty spiritual churches, gardens shut behind gates, guesthouses without guests, saints and sacred images gathering dust in quiet rooms. Places that had once carried the light of healing now seemed suspended in darkness.

Then she said, almost as an afterthought, “Do you know Marlon Santos? He runs a spiritual healing centre in southern Brazil. He is a legislator, so during the week he works in parliament, and on weekends he goes back to offer free healing to local people. His abilities are said to be similar to John of God’s. His situation is very bad too.”

“What happened?” I asked.

She paused, choosing the words carefully.

“His son was in a severe motorcycle accident recently,” she said. “They couldn’t save him. He was so young.”

Her voice softened. “Afterward, Santos made the difficult decision to donate his son’s organs. He said that since his son’s own life had ended, at least something of that life could continue in the bodies of others.”

I was moved by the enormity of that choice. It was a mercy carved out of devastation: compassion still reaching toward strangers from inside the wreckage of one family’s grief.

Yet even that suffering did not spare him.

“Not long after his son died,” my friend continued, “Santos was suddenly drawn into a series of strange political accusations. The media began covering him heavily. His political life was dragged into legal trouble and public scandal. Later, his healing centre was accused of practising medicine illegally.”

A deep sadness came over me. A man who had barely begun to absorb the death of his child had been pushed into another storm before his soul could steady itself. By then, I had become acutely alert to the force of sudden accusation, public labelling, and institutional power.

My friend sighed. “Honestly, we all find it strange. Too much happened at once. When you put it together, it feels as if he was being targeted.”

Listening to her, I felt my heart sink.

Any one of these events could have had an ordinary explanation: local politics, a legal dispute, a media storm, private tragedy. Yet, hearing them together through my friend’s account, they did not feel random to me. The timing had its own strange intelligence, as if the blows were falling with purpose on one healing centre after another.

On the surface, Senator Santos looked like a man overtaken by misfortune — first the death of his son, then political accusations, then pressure on his healing work. Beneath that visible sequence, I wondered whether there was another current. At the time, I began to see him as part of a growing line of spiritual workers whose influence might have drawn the attention of darker forces.

It was no longer only Abadiânia. Palmelo was under pressure; according to my friend, so was Santos’s centre in the south. Across Brazil, several healing centres spoken of in spiritual circles appeared to be weakening under legal trouble, public suspicion, and administrative obstruction. Places once known for healing were now struggling simply to remain open.

That was when the question first took shape in me. Could all of this really be coincidence? Or was some hidden power moving beneath these events, turning public authority against those who had tried to heal the world and awaken human consciousness?

I began to wonder whether something quieter and more deliberate lay beneath the ordinary surface of events: what I came to think of as a silent witch-hunt against spiritual awakening.

***

Around the same time, far from Brazil, another version of the pattern was taking shape in the Himalayan foothills.

Ram Bahadur Bomjon, the young Nepalese ascetic once regarded in global spiritual circles as a sign of human possibility, had also come under a familiar shadow.

Born in Nepal’s Bara District, Bomjon entered the world’s imagination in 2005, when, at fifteen, he sat for months beneath a tree in the forests of southern Nepal, reportedly without food or water. Journalists came to film him, pilgrims to bow before him, and documentary crews carried his image around the world. In a country where Buddhism, folk devotion, and living mystery still overlap, he became more than a young monk. To many, he seemed to offer proof that human consciousness was larger than the modern world allowed us to believe.

For a time, even the Nepalese authorities appeared to make room for him. The government reportedly issued special travel documents so he could take his teachings beyond Nepal. He stood, briefly and vividly, as one of the spiritual emblems of that era: a boy in stillness, drawing thousands toward the possibility of awakening.

Then the political weather changed.

By the time criminal investigations gathered around him, the official and public gaze had changed sharply. Devotion gave way to suspicion. The figure once approached by some as an awakened being became, in the public imagination, a man surrounded by police investigations.

Authorities began building a case against Bomjon around allegations of violence, abuse of followers, missing disciples, brainwashing, and unlawful confinement. The accusations accumulated until the story seemed almost impossible to lift from under their weight. He was eventually arrested over allegations involving the sexual assault of a minor and the disappearance of several devotees. A district court found him guilty and sentenced him.

For a while, that seemed to be the end of the legend. The young ascetic once filmed beneath a tree had become, in the public mind, a man marked by darkness. Later, Nepal’s High Court overturned the conviction on procedural grounds, and prosecutors later appealed to the Supreme Court. By then, however, the deeper damage had been done. His image had fractured. His followers had begun to fall away. His name no longer summoned stillness, mystery, or awakening, but controversy. Sometimes that is more fatal than a verdict.

What unsettled me was the rhythm of it all: the speed of the reversal, the familiar nature of the accusations, the ease with which reverence could be turned into stigma. I had no wish to excuse anyone. Human beings carry shadows, and spiritual practitioners are not exempt from them. The higher a person stands in public trust, the more seriously he must be examined.

Still, the pattern was difficult to ignore. In Brazil, Nepal, India, the United States, and elsewhere, the same kind of collapse seemed to recur. A spiritual figure gathered people, weakened fear, and awakened something inwardly free; then, almost as if in response, a counterforce appeared. The story changed. Healing became manipulation. Teaching became danger. A place once associated with awakening became a place of suspicion.

Accusations have power long before truth is settled. They can hollow out a reputation before any court has made its judgment. Fear does the rest. People withdraw, inquiry stops, and the force that once gathered around a spiritual figure disperses into doubt and silence.

***

As similar stories reached me from different countries, I found it harder to treat them as isolated cases. The falls of these spiritual figures differed in detail, yet the timing, method, and outcome carried an unsettling resemblance. The pressure seemed to fall first on individual healers and centres, then on what they represented: a loosening of human consciousness from sanctioned fear.

This, I came to believe, is why spiritual awakening unsettles hidden power. It may appear gentle, but it is difficult to govern. A person who begins to awaken no longer receives reality entirely from institutions. He may still listen to governments, media, and experts, yet something within him has begun to judge for itself.

Real healing weakens fear, and fear has always been one of the oldest tools of obedience. It teaches people to cling to authority and mistake control for safety. When fear loosens, conscience returns. Such a person may never become openly rebellious, but he becomes harder to govern from the outside.

That is the deeper threat. Awakening moves quietly between people until old methods of control begin to fail. What power fears most is the inwardly free human being, the one who can no longer be driven by fear alone.

Spiritual suppression does not have to announce itself as violence. It can arrive through procedures that appear sober and lawful: a damaged reputation, a guided public mood, an institutional response, followers withdrawing in fear or disgust. Each stage has its own explanation. Together, they can remove from public life those whose work might awaken something in others.

Later, I came to see this as the most dangerous part of such a witch-hunt: it teaches people to fear any force not certified by the system. What carries official approval feels safe; what stands outside it becomes suspect. Healing beyond sanctioned channels was treated as danger, and anything beyond the accepted map of knowledge was pushed back into ridicule or alarm. Without open force, the boundaries of consciousness can still be redrawn.

At its deepest level, the global suppression of spiritual development is a struggle over whether human consciousness is allowed to become free. It may fall upon certain teachers or centres, yet the real target is larger: the possibility that humanity might pass into another stage of awareness.

Years later, I still thought of that cold street in Abadiânia, of the owner of Café Central calling after me, “Read the Book of Revelation, sweetheart. It’s coming!” I thought, too, of Tracy looking into her açaí bowl and saying, “That power never belonged to one man.”

The sentence stayed with me. True light does not vanish with one person’s fall or one town’s silence. Human beings can be judged, ruined, silenced, even swallowed by their own shadows. Yet once the sacred fire has entered human consciousness, it is not easily put out. Darkness may close around a town, but it cannot close around the light that has already passed through the human heart.